I swallowed drily and reached for a suaveness I didn’t feel, answering, “Never met a sweet that I could deny.”

“Really now?” she asked in an unbelievably sexy voice, and licked her lips with a hot pink tongue.

“The lawyer, the lawyer,” I muttered to myself under my breath, as I labored to tear my eyes away from her penetrating gaze.

“What was that, Aerin?” Sheryl asked as she daintily wiped her mouth.

“Nothing, I was just thinking that I’d meant to ask you about the lawyer…” I answered, unable to complete a single coherent thought, I realized to my dismay.

“Well, Harley here is a lawyer, actually, and luckily for us knows the lawyer I’d consulted with before, and talked to Chris about …” Sheryl answered.

Great. Of course. Lance, wherever you are, remind me to thank you, buddy, for this.

“So I’m not sure if you need to consult with a lawyer, necessarily, because Harley can easily draw up whatever you both will agree on,” Sheryl added, but noted the look on my face, which I’d struggled to hide. Her voice trailed off.

“Aerin, what is it honey?” she asked with concern as she picked up more muttering under my breath.

“Maybe she hasn’t decided, Sheryl,” Harley jumped in, kindly, looking at me closely. “And of course, there is an element of conflict of interest here, if I draw up the papers …”

I groaned aloud, “What I would give for a Panglossian view of the world right now!” and dropped my head into my hands dramatically, massaging my temples.

Maybe I was, in fact, somehow named after one of those tragic heroines of Italian opera, if not literally, then spiritually.

“What?” I heard Sheryl ask confusedly.

“Pangloss was the name of the philosopher and tutor in Voltaire’s Candide,” Harley explained to Sheryl. I looked up at her and caught her smirk.

“And?” Sheryl asked, still confused.

“And so being Panglossian means being a person who maintains an unrealistic optimism, regardless of the circumstances. Just like Pangloss in Candide,” Harley added smiling wickedly at me.

Could this get any worse? I meet someone I am wildly attracted to, who gets my obscure reference to an 18^th century literary character, and who I cannot wait to get to know more about, as a result. But who I know will be the death of me. For real, this time.